In conventional tobacco processing, most of the process steps—such as conditioning, saucing, cutting, drying and expanding—are performed in separate standard apparatus such as drums, vaporizing tunnels, airflow dryers, belt dryers, etc. The tobacco is supplied to all of these apparatus as bulk material. During the processes, the tobacco is not generally subjected to any particular compression; cutting the tobacco is the only exception to this. Thus, the tobacco is processed largely at its natural filling capacity, resulting in large-volume apparatus for processing, which have to be erected in corresponding buildings.
Arranging treating devices one above the other (“vertical tobacco preparation”) in order to reduce the space requirement is known from DE 10 2004 043 833. To this end, it is of course necessary to provide correspondingly high buildings. It is also common practice to use buffer boxes in order to decouple processes, which in turn increases the space requirement as a whole.
A typical example of a specialized standard tobacco preparation in accordance with the prior art may be gathered from FIG. 5. The different tobaccos have individual processing lines, and each box in FIG. 5 represents a process step together with the corresponding apparatus. The different apparatus are connected to conveying elements such as channels or belts. One process step can often be illustrated by different apparatus, i.e. the processing step of drying can for example be performed in a drum dryer or an airflow dryer. The versatility of tobacco preparations which has occasionally been observed and has arisen through evolution, principally opposes the desire for standardization.
When consolidating working structures, tobacco preparation plants are generally difficult to relocate, since it is often not easily possible to transfer customized solutions to other sites.
A method for manufacturing comminuted tobacco material is known from DE 10 2004 059 388 B4, which illustrates how a comminuted, fibrous material which can directly be used in smoking products is manufactured from tobacco stem material with the aid of a screw extruder.
Furthermore, DE 10 2005 006 117.6 discloses a method which allows mixtures of tobacco stem materials to be extruded, with the addition of for example tobacco dust, in order to manufacture flavor-enhanced, fibrous materials comparable to cut tobacco and suitable for directly manufacturing smoking products.